Abstract

This paper offers evidence relevant to the debate regarding the use of stated willingnessto-
pay as a guide to public preferences about environmental management, and the
possibility that individuals have distinct preferences according to whether a consumer or
a citizen viewpoint is adopted. Multiple-use forest management requires some means of
comparing market and non-market forest outputs. With this in mind, attempts are found
in the economics literature to reveal public preferences for non-market forest outputs in
terms of willingness to pay using contingent valuation studies. On the other hand, it has
also been argued in the literature that estimated willingness to pay is not an appropriate or
reliable way to capture public preferences. Visitors to a UK forest were surveyed and the
forest managers were interviewed. In addition to willingness to pay for productive and
recreational forest sites with varying non-market outputs, respondents reported on
preferences for forest attributes from both a private/consumer and a social/citizen
viewpoint. Our results tend to support the hypothesis that individuals express different
preferences when adopting a consumer and a citizen viewpoint, and that the latter
viewpoint gives more weight to attributes with less direct and obvious visual appeal.
Despite this, visitors' willingness-to-pay estimates varied little whether consumer or
citizen explanatory variables were used, and visitors' ranking of the sites on this basis
differed from the ranking of forest managers. These results suggest that the
consumer/citizen distinction is important, and that valuable information regarding public
preferences is omitted if willingness-to-pay alone is used as a guide to decision-making.

URI

Collections

This item is available under the Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Ireland. No item may be reproduced for commercial purposes. Please refer to the publisher's URL where this is made available, or to notes contained in the item itself. Other terms may apply.